The Super-Definitive Ranking of Presidents
A 100% totally Scientific™ cost-benefit analysis of all 45 U.S. presidents
Two recent BW posts (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-Sci” and “Presidential Prodigiousness Potpourri”) lambasted the Bizarro World of presidential rankings from the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. Some of the more ludicrous findings are summarized/caricatured in the graphic above. Several readers asked me to offer my own rankings. I can’t do a 1-through-45 list, but I can lump them into five tiers: (T#1) highly positive, (T#2) somewhat positive, (T#3) neutral, (T#4) somewhat negative, and (T#5) highly negative. Caveats include:
This a snapshot of my thinking at a single moment. An earlier iteration had Eisenhower in T#1 and Truman in T#2. But nothing could move Washington and Lincoln from T#1 or Wilson and Andrew Johnson from T#5.
Ranking represents presidencies, not pre-presidential accomplishments. Madison’s role in the Federalist Papers and Constitution make him a titan, but his presidency was mediocre.
In a few cases, I give some weight to post-presidency behavior. This applies especially to Jimmy Carter, who has made himself a national pustule for over four decades.
I omit William Henry Harrison, Taylor, and Garfield, who died early in their presidencies.
Here are my tiers, fueled by incomplete, stream-of-consciousness narrative:
TIER 1 (T#1): HIGHLY POSITIVE
Each of these left at least one blockbuster accomplishment that swamps any negatives. WASHINGTON: defined presidency and its limits. JEFFERSON: Marines to Tripoli; Louisiana Purchase. MONROE: Monroe Doctrine. POLK: Westward expansion; Treasury autonomy. LINCOLN: saved Union. TEDDY ROOSEVELT: strengthened presidency; sired America-as-superpower. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: led Allies to victory (more than compensating for awful economic policies). TRUMAN: began containment of Communism. REAGAN: peacefully finished off the Soviet Union; ended Ford/Carter economic malaise and launched a 25-year boom.
TIER 2 (T#2): SOMEWHAT POSITIVE
These presidents made positive, but not earth-shattering contributions. ADAMS and MADISON: great men; mediocre presidents. JACKSON: giant who changed American politics and governance; quashed nullification; not T#1 because of divisiveness, brutality toward Native Americans, etc. GRANT: criminalized KKK, enforced by marshals; sought equal rights for Native Americans; sought to stabilize the dollar; some corrupt appointees, but supported investigations. ARTHUR: reformed civil service; strengthened Navy; tried improving life for African Americans and Native Americans. McKINLEY: sought peace with Spain; crushed Spain when war came; solidified Anglo-American relationship. HARDING: turned Wilson’s deep recession into eight years of prosperity; outstanding Court and Cabinet appointees (except a few who sullied his legacy); founded OMB and GAO; released Wilson’s political prisoners; good bipartisan relationships. COOLIDGE: proto-Reagan; sought limited government; resisted federal encroachment on state turf; clean administration; individual rights over collectivism; EISENHOWER: ended Korean War; resisted Vietnam involvement; founded Interstate highway system and space program; sent troops into Little Rock.
TIER 3 (T#3): NEUTRAL
Tier 3 presidents had mixed or low-key legacies. TYLER: clarified that VP who inherits the presidency is full-fledged president; used veto to restrain Henry Clay’s economic excesses; negotiated Texas Annexation; offended everyone and ended career in Confederate Congress. FILLMORE: sired Compromise of 1850; opened trade with Japan; (lots more achievements from BW commenter George Avery); reputation sullied by later nomination by Know-Nothings, but he distanced himself. HAYES: able leader in turbulent time; acquiesced in inevitable ending of Reconstruction; peacefully quelled violent labor actions; fought inflation; set the stage for modern presidency; installed first telephone in White House. CLEVELAND: Solid resistance to off-the-rails populism that consumed Democrats in Bryan Era; fought for strong U.S. dollar; plagued by labor turmoil and Panic of 1893. BENJAMIN HARRISON: Strengthened foreign relations, particularly Western Hemisphere; replaced political hacks with competent administrators. TAFT: Modest president between two egomaniacs; numerous undramatic reforms; later said his presidency was “a very humdrum, uninteresting administration” on which “I can look back [with] some pleasure in having done something for the benefit of the common weal;” Taft’s was the most distinguished ex-presidency of all, serving with distinction as Chief Justice. KENNEDY: Forced the Soviets to back down in Cuba; set America on course for moon landing; most rhetorically inspiring president since FDR; downsides include Bay of Pigs, pathological misogyny, and physical and mental debilities hidden from public.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH and GEORGE W. BUSH: Decisive presidents who had significant successes and failures; Bush 43 was the object of enormous polarization, but almost never its source (lightning rod, not lightning). Beginning with Carter, only the Bushes and Reagan didn’t view their task as publicly crapping all over their predecessors and successors for cheap political gain; both avoided interfering in their successors’ efforts; along with Reagan and Ford, neither exhibited the debilitating insecurities and hypersensitivities seen in all other presidents after Eisenhower; Bush 43 is revered in Africa, as his remarkably successful efforts against AIDS saved tens of millions of lives on that ravaged continent.
TIER 4 (T#4): SOMEWHAT NEGATIVE
All of these either governed badly, had serious personal failings, or both. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: great man whose presidency anticipated the Peter Principle a century-and-a-half before Peters wrote his book. VAN BUREN: masterful backroom negotiator in wrong place at wrong time; helpless against economic tailspin inherited from Jackson; feeble-looking after Jackson’s eight years of high dudgeon and endless drama. LYNDON JOHNSON: complex case; I originally had him in T#2, thanks largely to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; dropped him two tiers after conversing with a friend who thought he belongs in T#5; friend’s persuasive argument was:
“I think the damage done by LBJ is inestimable. We may never get out from under the costs of his enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, Vietnam was a disaster, he had no personal ethics, and he damaged politics enormously. He was certainly among the most competent presidents we ever had, but in terms of lasting damage, he’s way, way up there.”
NIXON: brilliant, highly accomplished; unwound LBJ’s disastrous Vietnam War; established relations with China; reversed over a century of cultural attrition against Native Americans; however, destroyed legacy with paranoia and vindictiveness (e.g., Watergate) and through incompetent economic policies (e.g., price controls, politicizing the Federal Reserve); points for respecting calls for impeachment and Supreme Court rulings on tapes as he imploded. FORD: thoroughly decent president who deserves kudos for leading the country out of Watergate; economic policies were disastrous (WIN buttons, gasoline lines); weak in foreign affairs (bowing to Brezhnev’s Soviet Union by refusing to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn).
CLINTON: in many ways a T#2 president; acted decisively in Balkans War with no Americans killed; understood the politics of his time and moderated views to accommodate ascendant Republicans; easily the most charming post-Reagan president; formidable intelligence; all sullied by sexual scandals, perjury, slippery personal finances, end-of-term pardons for sleaze-balls, and unleashing his wife’s treachery (e.g, White House Travel Office).
OBAMA: policy accomplishments might normally qualify him for T#3; greatest accomplishment was ending NASA’s monopoly and opening outer space to entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos; deserves thanks for liquidating Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; Obamacare was a wash, merely transforming one incoherent system into a slightly different incoherent system; Recovery Act (ARRA) was ineffective and fiscally damaging (but concern with fiscal sustainability has largely been abandoned by both parties of late); his inaugural address included rude, unnecessary, divisive potshots at the departing George W. Bush, who was forced to sit silently; in several public cases (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Henry Louis Gates, Ferguson), he stoked racial animus when silence was preferable; his unprecedented OFA (Obama for America/Organizing for America) project drained energy and finances away from the Democratic Party and fostered a cult of personality; obsequious and costly cultivation of Iranian mullahs.
TRUMP: Striking array of accomplishments as president mutilated by shambolic and self-destructive behavior; Abraham Accords; embassy to Jerusalem; crushing ISIS; isolating Hamas; energy independence (thereby starving Putin, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah of cash); killing Obama’s Iran deal; three decisive policy actions that enabled the impossible—a COVID vaccine in under a year; roaring economy until COVID (somewhat sullied by fondness for tariffs); record low unemployment for African Americans and Hispanic Americans; stunning success with judicial appointments; establishment of U.S. Space Force; surprisingly rapid economic recovery as COVID ended; deregulation; border enforcement; BUT, dereliction of duty in quelling January 6 mob; ebola-level verbal diarrhea generating endless caricaturable quotes; overkill in criticizing adversaries and senseless vilification of allies; personal insecurities that would shock Freud; damage to social fabric aside, endless railing against 2020 election (and January 6 negligence) takes Olympic Gold in self-destruction; had Trump simply congratulated Biden in 2020 and gone back to Mar-a-Lago to plot his 2024 revenge, he would almost certainly be a shoo-in for the current election (see “Frog and Scorpion”).
BIDEN: heaps of ineffective spending extravaganzas; disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; end of energy independence and re-enrichment of Russia and Iran (and Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis); high inflation; porous border; dereliction of duty in permitting mobs to surround Supreme Court Justices’ private residences, contrary to state and federal law; demagoguery on par with Trump, though more passive-aggressive and (showing more self control than Trump) not aimed at his own allies; destructive regulatory overreach (e.g., EV mandates); cognitive decline in office will be a powerful component of his legacy; forced from office by allies after disastrous debate that revealed to all what had long been obvious for years to anyone who cared to notice; sheltered throughout term of office from press and others (including his own cabinet); no meetings with House Democratic Caucus after Fall 2021, and no meetings with Cabinet after Fall, 2023.
TIER 5 (T#5): HIGHLY NEGATIVE
Well-being of the nation clearly damaged by T#5 presidents. PIERCE: unknown politician, dropped into the office by political manipulators, utterly unprepared for the task; witnessed death of his 11-year-old son in train wreck and spent presidency drenched in grief and alcohol; as country inched toward Civil War, pandered to slaveholders and vilified abolitionists; a few accomplishments (e.g., Gadsden Purchase, trade agreement with Japan). BUCHANAN: perhaps the most impressive resume of any president before George H. W. Bush; antislavery but disinclined to intervene; helpless as seven states seceded; perhaps no one could have done better than Buchanan, but his reputation doesn’t have the luxury of observable counterfactuals; Mary Todd Lincoln scolded her husband for feeding their cat from White House dining room table, and Lincoln answered with, “If that gold fork was good enough for President Buchanan, it is good enough for Tabby.” ANDREW JOHNSON: Lincoln’s biggest error; smarmy, trash-talking, pro-slavery demagogue elevated to presidency by assassination just as the country needed healing and absorption of freed slaves into civic life.
WILSON: worst racist in presidential history; reversed racial progress rather than tolerating status quo; Treaty of Versailles stoked rise of Nazis and WWII; imprisoned political opponents (e.g., Eugene V. Debs); despised constitutional limitations; scorned civil liberties (e.g., Red Scare raids); incapable of accommodation with Senate Republicans in foreign policy; saw his own election as divinely decreed; debilitating stroke was hidden for over a year, with Wilson’s wife effectively running the country; only Ph.D. president, which helps explains why he was such an asshole. HOOVER: tragic figure—brilliant, accomplished, and well-intentioned; but, compulsive, inveterate busybody whose manic tampering with the post-Stock Market Crash economy stoked, deepened, and lengthened the Great Depression; effectively began the worst aspects of the New Deal three years before FDR ousted him; fond of price controls and tariffs; signed Smoot-Hawley Act; thoughtful, insightful ex-president, but not enough to lift him to T#4.
CARTER: economic incompetent; rampaging inflation, ruinous interest rates, endless gas lines; preening meddler in foreign affairs; instrumental in bringing the mullahs to power in Iran; pissed off one ally after another; fawned over Communist leaders of Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania; tried to fawn over Communist leaders in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, but—to their credit—they couldn’t stand him, either; hosted Camp David Accords, yielding peace between Israel and Egypt, but Carter’s principal role may have been to trash Israel, to the annoyance of both Begin and Sadat; Carter originated (or popularized) the “apartheid” smear against Israel; in 1979, Iran took 53 Americans hostage, and Carter spent the remainder of his presidency whimpering about it in the Rose Garden; Islamic terrorists have been emboldened for 45 years, thanks to Carter’s message that the West is weak; famous for “Malaise Speech,” “Misery Index,” and “Mush from the Wimp;” couldn’t get along with Democrats in Congress, much less Republicans; has used his ex-president status to undermine the policies of practically every successor, Republican or Democrat—particularly in foreign affairs; in my view, no other president ever exhibited Carter’s astronomical ratio of perceived self-worth to actual worth (though several recent presidents have been trying their best).
INAUGURATION 2001!!! HUZZAH!!!
The Official Souvenir Program distributed at William McKinley’s second inauguration in 1901 offered a peculiar work of whimsy—a 1,500-word description of inauguration of one “George McKinley Barrington” as President of the United States of the Americas—in 2001. It offers a snapshot of what late Victorian Era Americans presumed would be the aspirations and ideals of their great-grandchildren a century hence. This fantasy, a blend of science fiction and colonialist utopianism, was reproduced in its entirety in a July 2023 Bastiat’s Window feature, “Longtermism and President Barrington.” The 1901 fantasy did correctly predict that the president inaugurated in 2001 would be named “George.”
What a great summary! It doesn't matter that I disagree with you on many of the rankings (Harding and Coolidge, which I've windbagged about earlier. Also think if Taft is going to be praised as a most distinguished ex-Prez he should be compared to J.Q. Adams, who I think matches Taft's ex-Presidency for his anti-slavery fight in the House) I especially like the capsule summaries given to each Prez. Much more thought provoking thatn the "I don't like him or his politics" gouging that the poli sci profs used to put Big Don down.
Go on, grat man!
So much good debate material here!
Regarding Jimmy Carter, let's not forget that he added to our woes immeasurably by giving the education blob its own cabinet department. Also, I'd put LBJ with the very worst for a host of reasons, foremost among them the disaster of federal student aid for college. That alone is responsible for much of our current misery.